Judd Apatow Stands Up

Judd Apatow has returned to standup, in gigs ranging from “The Tonight Show” to Carnegie Hall.

Photograph courtesy NBC.

Comedy is entertainment, of course, but now, perhaps more than ever, it’s also the primary arena in which we work everything out. Politics, race, gender, love, respect, sex, fairness, unfairness, bodies, how we treat each other: we figure these things out together, with help from our sharpest and funniest thinkers, by watching smart late-night TV, watching movies and sitcoms, and listening to comedy podcasts. Most efficiently, perhaps, we do it through watching standup: in the past few years, Louis C.K. has been one of our most useful philosophers. Then there are those who excel at the cozier or dirtier comedy arts, such as the writer, producer, and director Judd Apatow, in work ranging from “Freaks and Geeks” to “Girls” to “Trainwreck” to, now, standup.

Next week, Apatow comes to the New York Comedy Festival, a series of shows presented in association with Comedy Central, which is returning for its twelfth year. Like many festivals, it’s huge, and possibly flummoxing: more than sixty events and two hundred performers. The lineup of Stand Up for Heroes, next Tuesday, a benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation, includes Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Ray Romano, Jon Stewart, and the non-comedian Bruce Springsteen. Elsewhere, at venues ranging from Caroline’s to BAM to Town Hall to Kings Theatre, you can see both emerging comedians and big names: Trevor Noah, Nathan Fielder, Margaret Cho, Kumail Nanjiani, Kathy Griffin, Larry Wilmore, Norm Macdonald, Sarah Silverman, Billy Crystal, and so on. On Saturday the 14th, you can see Judd Apatow and friends—Mike Birbiglia among them—at Carnegie Hall.

Apatow started doing standup at seventeen, took a long hiatus when he began writing and producing, and, like Jerry Seinfeld in “Comedian” or Adam Sandler’s character in Apatow’s “Funny People,” returned to it in midlife, after having become a titan. He’s been doing it for the past year and a half, at venues like the Comedy Cellar, in New York, and Largo, in Los Angeles, accompanied by announced or surprise friends, such as Kevin Hart or Maria Bamford. This summer, he performed in the Trainwreck Comedy Tour with Amy Schumer and other comedians from the movie, and did standup on “The Tonight Show.” He also published a book, “Sick in the Head,” which describes his obsession with comedy as a kid growing up on Long Island and collects interviews he conducted with comedians, beginning when he was a teen-ager.

Recently, I asked him about his return to live performance. “I did a little bit of standup when I was working on ‘Funny People,’ but I was mainly doing jokes as a way of writing them for Adam to do in the movie,” he said, in a phone call from his office in Los Angeles. “It was a fool’s errand for me.” Apatow hadn’t done standup seriously for about twenty-two years. “I did the HBO Young Comedians Special in 1992,” he said. “Dana Carvey hosted it. We shot it at the Tempe Improv. And that was my dream.” Growing up, the Young Comedians Special “was the show that always blew my mind, where I first saw everybody from Andy Kaufman to Robin Williams.” But afterward, Apatow, who was working on “The Ben Stiller Show,” abandoned standup for a while. “I thought that the universe was telling me not to do any standup,” he said. “I kept getting writing jobs and not making an enormous amount of progress in my standup career.”

Recently, while working with Schumer on “Trainwreck,” her stories about fun gigs on tour made him wistful, as had an interview he’d conducted with Eddie Vedder for “Sick in the Head”: he was reminded that live performance can offer satisfactions that making movies can lack. “When you’re a musician, you have all the pain of writing a song, but then for the rest of your life it only brings you and the audience pleasure,” he said. A movie, he said, is like writing a song and then writing another song. “You don’t get the pure joy of your greatest hit. I was hungering for a less stressful, more immediate experience of comedy.”

He asked Schumer and her sister, Kim Caramele, to send him some premises—What if you had boys instead of girls?—and he wrote some jokes. “One night I went up at the Comedy Cellar. Amy was watching, I think hoping I was going to bomb. But it went well. And then I realized that it put me in a really good mood. One of the reasons I stopped doing standup was I had low self-esteem. I would think, Who wants to listen to me babble about anything? And I thought that doing standup was a positive message to send myself, that I have some value. It’s a way of saying to myself, ‘I don’t hate you. You shouldn’t hide under a rock.’ ” He laughed.

Writing standup, he said, is “like putting your brain in a different gear. Usually when I’m thinking of ideas, I’m thinking of them in terms of scenes. If I wake up in the middle of the night and I think, When people get really, really old, we all think that whatever they have done or eaten in their life is the secret to long life, even if all they did was eat beef and drink Scotch and never exercise, normally I’d think that’s a funny character in a movie: the old guy with bad health habits. But now I could just describe it. And hopefully it would be funny at some point.”

Wringing comedy out of his thoughts isn’t always easy. “Sometimes what I’m thinking about is so depressing or dark I can’t see the road to the joke,” he said. “For instance, I was thinking about how when I watch the news sometimes I will allow myself to cry at some tragedy. But I can’t live in that state. So I’ll only allow myself to cry at one thing on the news. Probably there are thirty things on the news that are worthy of my tears. But whatever human tragedy comes on after that, I’ll think, No, I gave it all to the dog who fell through the ice.”

One of the tragedies that Apatow has given much attention to is the Bill Cosby situation. On Twitter and elsewhere, he’s been outspoken about defending Cosby’s victims and about not letting Cosby off the hook, legally or culturally. (Cosby has not been charged with a crime.) On “WTF with Marc Maron,” this summer, Apatow, who was preparing for his “Tonight Show” set, talked about a premise he needed to modify for TV: the idea that in Hell, Bill Cosby should be raped by himself.

“That felt a little strong,” Apatow said to me. “The idea that Hell for Bill Cosby would be to be sexually assaulted every night by a different character from a Bill Cosby movie or television show. So one day it might be the guy from ‘I Spy’ and another it might be ‘Leonard Part 6’ or the guy from ‘Let’s Do It Again,’ because that’s the only way he would understand the pain he had inflicted on other people. I tried it once or twice onstage before I realized that nobody wants to hear about that.”

What he did do on “The Tonight Show” was rather incredible, and I asked him how he got there. “One night, just out of frustration with the whole situation, I wrote a ten-minute routine of what Bill Cosby’s act is right now,” he said. Apatow, like many of us, is agitated that Cosby, an accused serial rapist, is just out living his life, which includes doing standup. Apatow recorded the set and considered putting it on the Internet anonymously—having it sound “like an old record from the sixties.” He “thought better of it,” but realized that within it was a section that worked well. When he performed that section live, it would always get the biggest response. “All of the comedians said, ‘Oh, you have to do it on “The Tonight Show,” ’ ” he said. “I was not so sure that that would work.” But it did—and on NBC. (As of recently, a huge mural of NBC’s many decades of TV stars hung in the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Center, with Cosby, as Cliff Huxtable, looming large in the middle.)

In his “Tonight Show” set, after a bunch of likable, funny jokes (about being pro-ugliness, for example), Apatow closed with his Cosby bit, which patiently, intelligently, and powerfully used Cosby’s own style to damn him. “You ever been in trouble with the wife?” he begins. “You ever get in the doghouse with the wife? Because of something that you did?” (Watch it here.) I asked him how he went from the Hell idea to the doghouse idea, which joins Schumer’s “Court of Public Opinion” sketch, and the Hannibal Buress joke that changed everything, in the strange art of using comedy to help people refocus and clarify their understanding of Cosby.

“I went back and listened to all his of his records,” Apatow said. (Like many of us, Apatow is a former Cosby fan.) “It’s weird, because there’s some really bizarre material on there—you know, there’s a bit about running after his wife, and about Spanish fly. But what’s most disturbing is that most of the material is about feeling powerless in his home. When you listen to it now, he’s so angry. And it makes sense in a much more disturbing way. That it was a guy who had issues he felt he had to work out outside of the home. And it’s all deeply sad, and troubling.

“I think we all process pain and tragedy through humor, so we should be able to talk about this, just like we should be able to talk about anything that’s happening on earth,” Apatow said. “But ultimately all that matters is he hurt a lot of people. He affected their lives in a really negative way for the rest of their lives. And he’s still just home and hasn’t been punished yet. And if it was somebody else, and he’d raped forty or fifty people, we’d all be in a panic! That he was still walking around. ‘Hey, there’s a rapist!’ ‘Yeah, he lives down in that big house!’ People would be very upset. So there’s something about the show-business connection and his history that changes the whole equation in a way we should examine.”

I told Apatow that Bobcat Goldthwait had said that when he’d started making the movie “Call Me Lucky” and bringing attention to its subject, Barry Crimmins, who was raped as a child, he noticed that people couldn’t even say the word “rape.” They couldn’t handle it; people often don’t know what to do.

“Well, that’s how he got away with it, is that people would rather turn away than face that violence and pain,” Apatow said. “So it would be easier to not think about it. And, you know, he’s inflicting pain on young people, people who are at the beginning of their careers, people who feel like if they speak up they’ll never work again. Look at who he victimized. They’re perfectly chosen, in the same way a priest does it to a child who’s afraid to speak up. And just like a pedophile priest, he’s doing charity work, and a lot of positive things which provide him cover and make it harder for people to accuse him. There’s no difference, really, between what’s happening with the Catholic Church and what’s happening at college campuses or what’s happening in the military and what’s happening with Cosby. Powerful people, engines for money, who want to sweep behavior under the rug to maintain the status quo. And, sadly, the only thing that makes it change is talking about it constantly. We don’t want to talk about it constantly. It’s the saddest thing in the world. But only brave people speaking up, you know, changes institutions. I mean, they’re battleships that are hard to turn around.”(The Carnegie Hall show is a benefit for Everytown for Gun Safety; the gun establishment is another institutional battleship that’s hard to turn around.)

Good comedy, besides helping us confront the terrible, can help us imagine things that are better. This is especially true with narrative comedy work, whose stories can give us realistic but improved scenarios from our own lives. I mentioned to Apatow that in a podcast about “Trainwreck,” my colleagues and I had argued a bit over whether Bill Hader’s character was too perfect for Schumer’s train-wreck character to be believable—but later, I’d remembered that one of the great pleasures of “Freaks and Geeks” was watching Sam actually date Cindy, or Daniel play D. & D. with the geeks, and for joy to emerge, at least temporarily, from those unlikely pairings. I asked him about the interplay between fantasy and reality in his work.

“People always say, ‘Aw, that guy would never get that girl!’ ” Apatow said. “And I think, Well, I’m married to Leslie Mann! I couldn’t be goofier! Whenever anybody questions that I go, ‘Well, just walk down the street and look who’s holding hands.’ ” He went on to list Bill Hader’s character’s flaws: quick to run away, control freak. Also, he said, “I think there’s a lot of guys who are, on the surface, super fun, easy guys, and they’re just riddled with hostility just below the surface. Their problems come out in sneaky ways. The most important thing I ever learned was, All people-pleasing leads to rage. If people don’t respond properly to your people-pleasing, you just become a rageaholic.” “Trainwreck,” he said, is a “fantasy about what happens when you meet the right person and you’re not ready for it.”

He went on, “But I do think that movies and television are about providing hope. People debated it a little bit on ‘Girls,’ the episode where Adam Driver runs to Lena Dunham, picks her up and carries her out of her apartment at the end of the season. And Lena and I would always say, ‘Well, you don’t know what happened the next day.’ Nothing could work out. And nothing did work out. But you do have those fantastic nights and perfect moments. Everyone who’s divorced can tell you fifty magic moments they had. Life is all ups and downs. You can’t make every episode or every movie ‘No Country for Old Men.’ ”

I told him that I often wished that movies had more happy moments in them: love stories, especially, tend to be a long convoluted conflict that resolves at the very last moment. Later, I remembered that his best movies, unlike most movies, actually do provide that: “Trainwreck” is mostly happy, with a slightly convoluted sequence of discord, followed by more happiness; “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” ends with a hilarious post-virginity euphoria sequence; “Bridesmaids,” which for me had a little too much meanness and a little too much diarrhea, ended in a joyful song. Apatow is often criticized for the length of his movies, but part of what makes his work special, at its best, is that he manages to achieve moments of connection, honesty, warmth, and joy that you don’t always find in mainstream comedies. The amount that he writes and shoots is part of what makes that possible. (Whether he edits it sternly enough is another question.) He said that his new show, “Love,” which he created for Netflix with the married couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin, is a “love story told in slow motion. So we see every detail from the moment they first see each other to them deciding to maybe call each other. I realized that there wasn’t a romantic comedy on cable that just examined the couple. And it seemed like such a simple, obvious idea: a deeper examination of a couple in a funny, uncensored way. And then nobody could complain it was too long, because the series will be like fifty hours long.”

He’s also expanding on “Sick in the Head.” “I’m doing some more interviews for the paperback edition,” he said. “I may start work on the sequel. I always like to have an excuse to talk to comedians. It’s hard for me to get Don Rickles to talk to me where I’m allowed to ask him anything I want to ask him about comedy. But if I’m writing a book he’ll do it.” The proceeds from “Sick in the Head” go to 826, the tutoring and literacy organization that Dave Eggers co-founded. “I started helping out with fund-raising for it a long time ago,” Apatow said. “I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, and then I realized, Oh! Writing saved my life.”

The Carnegie Hall show is a big moment for him—and healthy, no doubt, for his self-esteem. “I grew up on Long Island, and I remember having Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall,” he said. “And it’s a huge overreach for me to do it, but I couldn’t be more excited that I’m going to get the chance. It is a real dream come true. When I was a kid, I saw Loudon Wainwright open up for Donovan at Carnegie Hall—one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. When I think of Carnegie Hall, I don’t think of Jascha Heifetz. I think of Loudon Wainwright and Donovan.”

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.